In the far corner of my childhood bedroom, a copy of The Bill JamesHistorical Baseball Abstract stood out among the mishmash of baseball cards and rolled-up posters that formed the obligatory bookshelf-cum-sports-shrine. Bulky, heavy, and dense, the Abstract was forbidding. Who had the energy, or the patience, to really engage with its contents? Each page seemed to contain its own world; there was no chance I could possibly finish it. But James’s book imparted a certain gravitas to an otherwise ordinary collection. The sheer amount of knowledge a book contained was proportional to the seriousness it conveyed. Even though I hardly glanced at James before age 18, the Abstract’s mere presence was a sign that I was a step closer to adulthood than one might have rightfully concluded at first glance. More important, it was proof that sports, the thing I loved most in the world, could be taken seriously.

It is easy to say that the vast majority of sports commentary—and, indeed, the vast majority of every aspect of life that even touches on the worlds of professional and collegiate sports—is embarrassingly childish. But this understates the case, because even as a child or teenager, every thinking fan is certain to feel that the entire circus is beneath his dignity. It is not just the inane, wannabe-macho commentary during every halftime show, or the ever-present backdrop of misogyny, or the incessant beer ads that run during time-outs. By high school—at the very latest—one could surmise that a deep love of sports was meant only for dumb jocks, and was therefore incompatible with the contemplative life. What intelligent person, after all, would choose to spend his Sundays with Terry Bradshaw’s grating folksiness and Mike Ditka’s roaring bluster?

If James and Ditka represented the two poles of the sports commentariat, surely the middlebrow fan could find a middle ground. This territory was for a long time occupied by Dan Patrick and Keith Olbermann’s ESPN show, SportsCenter (and their book, The Big Show, which came along a few years later). Olbermann and Patrick registered the impressive accomplishment of making sports highlights even more compelling; yet neither had Ditka’s transparent machismo or James’s intimidating nerdiness. The brilliance of Olbermann and Patrick’s shtick was that their observations and analysis came from such a distance. Indeed, this constituted their entire mode of scrutinizing the sports universe. They probably felt the same passion as other sports fans, but their routine was so full of irony and sarcasm that they hovered above the spectacle. It was as if they, too, sensed that the wonderful world of sports was full of nothing so much as hot air, and thus the only way to preserve what they loved was to take a step backward. Why not gently mock and jeer and wink at viewers, empowering both them and yourselves in the process?

The Big Show feels dated today because Olbermann occupies such a radically different place in our culture, but also because ESPN’s television commentary has been dumbed down significantly. However, in a chapter portentously titled “How to Be a Sportscaster When You Grow Up,” the authors not only manage to outshine expectations with some enjoyable advice, they also preach the following:

Another part of the attitude adjustment may come as a shock. Do not take sports seriously. Take your work seriously: Be dedicated to it, know everything you need to know about it, enjoy it, remember that the viewer or listener may be fanatical about it—but maintain a healthy distance from it. The moment you think that a sports team or league or player is actually important, you become a servant of the “sports media complex” whose only purpose in being is to separate people from their money. Your dedication has to be to your viewer or listener, to the truth, and, lastly, and only to the degree that it does not conflict with your ethics, to the success of your employer.

MSNBC viewers will not be shocked to learn that Olbermann was the writer of this self-important passage. And yet, he neatly defines the Olbermann-Patrick ethos: artfully remain above the fray.

Olbermann and Patrick set the standard for sports commentary, even if they did not “redefine” it sufficiently (the term is taken from Bob Costas’s introduction). A legion of imitators, on both ESPN and other sports networks, did their best to mimic the anchormen’s detachment. The problem was that a smirking sense of humor can, shockingly, come across as obnoxious. Olbermann and Patrick managed to strike the right balance, but many of the next generation’s commentators were no more than smug, arrogant jerks (Costas ruefully concedes this). Despite their achievement, room remained for an entirely different approach that could still thread the needle between aggressive masculinity and statistical obsessiveness.

This might seem both rather obvious and easily attainable, but Bill Simmons threaded this needle more skillfully than his competitors. Simmons, a Boston-bred ESPN.com writer living in Los Angeles, is, without much question, the most popular sports columnist in America. He is extremely prolific and, for a sportswriter, quite intellectually curious. His first book, an account of the Red Sox’ miraculous 2004 season, was tellingly called Now I Can Die in Peace. His latest effort, a 700-plus-page history of the NBA, is biblically titled The Book of Basketball. From a distance, the book looks like a Tolstoy novel: its encyclopedic ambitions are clear. But as with all of Simmons’s work, it is written in (usually excellent) conversational prose and sprinkled with digressions, in-jokes, and bawdiness. It is the work of a true fan—an emotional, biased observer who seems to relish his subjectivity. Simmons might be walking the same line that Olbermann and Patrick once trod—the line that separates mathematical formulas from beer jokes (and believe me, the book contains plenty of both). But Basketball is not ironic or dispassionate. And it might just represent the next phase of sports commentary.

Simmons is known on ESPN.com as “The Sports Guy”; readers can be excused if this reminds them of a politician who calls himself a “man of the people.” In public, Simmons fans love to yell out “Hey, Sports Guy!”—which (again) recalls voters who, when interviewed on camera about their candidate of choice, say that he is “one of us.” To Simmons’s credit, however, the unassuming nickname actually fits him comfortably. In certain respects, the public figure that Simmons most clearly resembles is the early David Letterman, although Letterman has never tried to seem like an average guy. Still, they have one thing in common: the way they personalize their work. Letterman fills his show with in-jokes and (usually self-deprecating) personal references, but he also demands that his viewers accept what he thinks is funny. If you do not think that throwing watermelons off the roof is interesting, then you are out of luck, because Dave finds it fascinating. You rarely get the sense that Letterman’s show revolves around jokes that he himself finds boring and lowbrow. (The opposite is true of Jay Leno, a comedian canny enough to understand his audience.) Of course, this tendency is also Letterman’s greatest weakness as an entertainer (“Oprah, Uma”).

Simmons is eerily similar in this regard. If you do not recognize his pop-culture references, too bad. If you don’t like the long digressions about Teen Wolf (a mid-’80s Michael J. Fox film about basketball, for those who do not regularly read Simmons), too bad. True, Olbermann and Patrick would also make plenty of references to pop culture, but the references came across as charmingly haughty, as if the anchormen were showing us that they had interests that extended beyond the court or field. Simmons’s podcasts, now a regular feature of his ESPN page, are filled with conversations between the host and his old friends and relatives. He thinks they are interesting, and you should too. That takes a certain arrogance, but Simmons is smart enough to follow his own good instincts.

The opening pages of Now I Can Die in Peace—subtitled How the Sports Guy Found Salvation Thanks to the World Champion (Twice!) Red Sox—give a good window into Simmons’s style. Here is how he begins the book:

My editors had to dissuade me from naming this book Love Child of the Impossible Dream. The more I thought about it, they were probably right—it sounds like the title of a John Mayer album, or maybe a crappy civil rights epic starring Reese Witherspoon and Omar Epps. And we wouldn’t want that.

The second sentence here is clumsily written, which is not often true of Simmons’s prose (I’ll return to this later), but one immediately understands that we are getting Red Sox history through a very particular prism. A footnote on the first page makes the following observation:

Imagine being stuck at an all-male school in 20-degree weather? Yikes. If you’re scoring at home, Holy Cross finally started admitting women in 1972, although they didn’t start admitting women who put out until 1999.

A few pages later, however, Simmons is talking about his parents’ divorce. In other words, he gets away with (most of) his sex jokes because the reader understands perfectly well that he isn’t striving to be the toughest guy in the room. He jokes about sex because everyone jokes about sex; he has the same unfiltered quality that we expect from our friends. Similarly, his writing about his father is emotionally rich, but avoids the sentimentality that is often the gruesome complement to manly posturing (think Oliver North or Tom Clancy).

If Simmons’s first book was a personal journey through Red Sox fandom, The Book of Basketball is an even more personal travelogue through the NBA galaxy. Simmons has always loved professional basketball; he is both a passionate critic of the sport’s (and the league’s) shortcomings, and a fierce opponent of people who deplore the pro game and have a more politically correct—and misguided—preference for college basketball. Unsurprisingly (or do I mean unfortunately?), Simmons is a Celtics fan, and while his bias more than occasionally reveals itself, his enthusiasm for basketball is infectious. It is hard to summarize exactly what The Book of Basketball is: Simmons has written a guide to NBA history, a list of the 96 greatest players of all time, and a memoir of his relationship with the sport—all with his trademark humor and style. In an early footnote about Boston’s reputation for not embracing black players, he notes,

Boston’s deep-seated racial issues bubbled to the surface one year later, thanks to a divisive decision to proactively integrate Boston’s public schools and all the ugliness that followed. Although, looking back, it was probably a red flag that Reggie Smith and Jim Rice were the only black guys on the Red Sox for like 40 years and everybody was fine with this.

Even the sections of the book that most resemble a reference work are written in this same style. His player rankings begin with dense statistics, but then Simmons lets loose. Here is the opening of his mini-essay on the Dallas Mavericks forward Dirk Nowitzki, who led his team to the NBA finals in 2006, only to suffer a crushing loss:

The NBA’s alpha dog almost ended up being German. Yup, we came that close in the 2006 Playoffs—if not for the heroics of Wade, Salvatore, Payton, and others, Germany would have made its biggest advancement on American culture since David Hasselhoff infiltrated the horny brains of teenage guys with Baywatch. Personally, I was terrified—this was the same country that started two world wars and deliberately injured Pele in Victory.

(The names above belong to perennial NBA all-stars Dwyane Wade and Gary Payton; Salvatore is Bennett Salvatore, a referee who Simmons thinks is at best incompetent.) A couple of pages later, he is discussing whether to induct Nowitzki into the “42 Club,” which is named for a strange (but helpful) statistical formula that Simmons himself has created. But to get to the Jamesian formula, you first have to consume a couple of politically incorrect jokes and a reference to an early-’80s movie that, one hopes, very few people remember.

This is Simmons at his best, but his tics are occasionally irritating. The Sox’ victory “wasn’t just a lucky chain of events,” he writes.

This was like winning the lottery three different times, or better yet, like Justin Timberlake banging Britney Spears, Jessica Biel, Scarlett Johansson, and Cameron Diaz in their primes, only if he had added Lindsay Lohan, Angelina Jolie, and Katie Holmes.

These jokes, sprinkled over 700 pages, become wearying. Simmons, at times, would benefit from taking at least a half step backward and sticking to his subject matter.

Simmons’s biases are part of his charm, although his chapter comparing Wilt Chamberlain with the Boston Celtic Bill Russell could have used more objectivity. By the time he ends his case for Russell with “the defense rests,” his sometimes thoughtful insights into these two great big men have been obscured by the feeling that we are watching a show trial. He also adopts the annoying habit—perhaps from his friend Malcolm Gladwell (who wrote the book’s introduction)—of quoting statistics and telling us what to think about them, or assuming that we will draw the same conclusions from them that he does. In the same chapter, Simmons, perhaps unable to resist his better instincts, spends two pages trying to expose the “myth” that Chamberlain was a “great guy.” Well, fine. I once approached Russell at a Chinese restaurant, where he was standing alone, and told him that I was a huge admirer of his. He grunted and turned his head away. I enjoy repeating this story to my friends who are Celtics fans, but alas, I would not argue that it proves Wilt Chamberlain is the greatest center in NBA history.

Still, Simmons’s personal recollections of his favorite players are generally smart and well executed. In an especially good section on Larry Bird, he writes,

You can’t call him a superhero because he wasn’t saving lives or making the world a better place. At the same time, he possessed heroic qualities because everyone in New England bought into his invincibility. He came through too many times for us. After a while, we started expecting him to come through, and when he still came through, that’s when we were hooked for good … Unfortunately you can’t glance through Bird’s career statistics in the Official NBA Register and find the statistic for “most times the fans expected their best player to come through and he actually did.”

The tone here—personal but intellectually open-minded—is just right.

The standard rap on Simmons is that he is no more than a passionate fan who happens to be a terrific writer, and this is more or less true. His writing, over 700 pages, rarely flags—an impressive achievement considering how many sports columns stall after 700 words. Some have faulted Simmons for his lack of interest in reporting, and rightfully so. The upside of this, however, is well phrased by Gladwell:

The other part about being a fan is that a fan is always an outsider. Most sportswriters are not, by this definition, fans. They capitalize on their access to athletes. They spoke to Kobe last night, and Kobe says his finger is going to be fine. They spent three days fly-fishing with Brett Favre in March, and Brett says he’s definitely coming back for another season.

Simmons may not be removed from his passions, but he does appear remarkably distant from the sports establishment. His biases and shortcomings are the result of childhood allegiances, not off-the-record dinners with Larry Bird. He is willing to endlessly criticize athletes, and his attack on the NBA’s secretive management style and pathetic officiating continues to be his most valuable contribution as a writer. (In this same outsider spirit, Simmons divides his bibliography into books that were helpful and books that are not particularly worth reading. Not only is this useful for prospective readers, but it marks a nice break from the normal back-scratching.) The only time that I can remember seeing him completely desert common sense and succumb to old-fashioned conventional wisdom was when he decided to pile on Patriots coach Bill Belichick’s controversial decision to “go for it” on a fourth-and-two last season. But, of course, we are talking about the New England Patriots.

The danger of Simmons’s approach—for the rest of us, if not for him—is the same danger that eventually overtook ESPN after Olbermann and Patrick left. Personalized, opinionated discourse is fine, but if you cannot write as intelligently and humorously as Simmons can, you might as well leave the rest of us in peace. My guess is that 10 years from now, Simmons will come to be seen as an outlier, primarily because few people will be able to match his style and skill. Sports commentary will still be a swamp of dank bromides and unattractive aggression. “You either love sports or you don’t,” Simmons declares, tautologically, at the end of his first book, and about this proposition, he has never wavered. A love of sports is not a sufficient condition for smart sports commentary, but it very well might be a necessary one.

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Writing used to be a solitary profession. How did it become so interminably social?

Whether we’re behind the podium or awaiting our turn, numbing our bottoms on the chill of metal foldout chairs or trying to work some life into our terror-stricken tongues, we introverts feel the pain of the public performance. This is because there are requirements to being a writer. Other than being a writer, I mean. Firstly, there’s the need to become part of the writing “community”, which compels every writer who craves self respect and success to attend community events, help to organize them, buzz over them, and—despite blitzed nerves and staggering bowels—present and perform at them. We get through it. We bully ourselves into it. We dose ourselves with beta blockers. We drink. We become our own worst enemies for a night of validation and participation.

Even when a dentist kills an adored lion, and everyone is furious, there’s loftier righteousness to be had.

Now is the point in the story of Cecil the lion—amid non-stop news coverage and passionate social-media advocacy—when people get tired of hearing about Cecil the lion. Even if they hesitate to say it.

But Cecil fatigue is only going to get worse. On Friday morning, Zimbabwe’s environment minister, Oppah Muchinguri, called for the extradition of the man who killed him, the Minnesota dentist Walter Palmer. Muchinguri would like Palmer to be “held accountable for his illegal action”—paying a reported $50,000 to kill Cecil with an arrow after luring him away from protected land. And she’s far from alone in demanding accountability. This week, the Internet has served as a bastion of judgment and vigilante justice—just like usual, except that this was a perfect storm directed at a single person. It might be called an outrage singularity.

Forget credit hours—in a quest to cut costs, universities are simply asking students to prove their mastery of a subject.

MANCHESTER, Mich.—Had Daniella Kippnick followed in the footsteps of the hundreds of millions of students who have earned university degrees in the past millennium, she might be slumping in a lecture hall somewhere while a professor droned. But Kippnick has no course lectures. She has no courses to attend at all. No classroom, no college quad, no grades. Her university has no deadlines or tenure-track professors.

Instead, Kippnick makes her way through different subject matters on the way to a bachelor’s in accounting. When she feels she’s mastered a certain subject, she takes a test at home, where a proctor watches her from afar by monitoring her computer and watching her over a video feed. If she proves she’s competent—by getting the equivalent of a B—she passes and moves on to the next subject.

The Wall Street Journal’s eyebrow-raising story of how the presidential candidate and her husband accepted cash from UBS without any regard for the appearance of impropriety that it created.

The Swiss bank UBS is one of the biggest, most powerful financial institutions in the world. As secretary of state, Hillary Clinton intervened to help it out with the IRS. And after that, the Swiss bank paid Bill Clinton $1.5 million for speaking gigs. TheWall Street Journal reported all that and more Thursday in an article that highlights huge conflicts of interest that the Clintons have created in the recent past.

The piece begins by detailing how Clinton helped the global bank.

“A few weeks after Hillary Clinton was sworn in as secretary of state in early 2009, she was summoned to Geneva by her Swiss counterpart to discuss an urgent matter. The Internal Revenue Service was suing UBS AG to get the identities of Americans with secret accounts,” the newspaper reports. “If the case proceeded, Switzerland’s largest bank would face an impossible choice: Violate Swiss secrecy laws by handing over the names, or refuse and face criminal charges in U.S. federal court. Within months, Mrs. Clinton announced a tentative legal settlement—an unusual intervention by the top U.S. diplomat. UBS ultimately turned over information on 4,450 accounts, a fraction of the 52,000 sought by the IRS.”

There’s no way this man could be president, right? Just look at him: rumpled and scowling, bald pate topped by an entropic nimbus of white hair. Just listen to him: ranting, in his gravelly Brooklyn accent, about socialism. Socialism!

And yet here we are: In the biggest surprise of the race for the Democratic presidential nomination, this thoroughly implausible man, Bernie Sanders, is a sensation.

He is drawing enormous crowds—11,000 in Phoenix, 8,000 in Dallas, 2,500 in Council Bluffs, Iowa—the largest turnout of any candidate from any party in the first-to-vote primary state. He has raised $15 million in mostly small donations, to Hillary Clinton’s $45 million—and unlike her, he did it without holding a single fundraiser. Shocking the political establishment, it is Sanders—not Martin O’Malley, the fresh-faced former two-term governor of Maryland; not Joe Biden, the sitting vice president—to whom discontented Democratic voters looking for an alternative to Clinton have turned.

During the multi-country press tour for Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation, not even Jon Stewart has dared ask Tom Cruise about Scientology.

During the media blitz for Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation over the past two weeks, Tom Cruise has seemingly been everywhere. In London, he participated in a live interview at the British Film Institute with the presenter Alex Zane, the movie’s director, Christopher McQuarrie, and a handful of his fellow cast members. In New York, he faced off with Jimmy Fallon in a lip-sync battle on The Tonight Show and attended the Monday night premiere in Times Square. And, on Tuesday afternoon, the actor recorded an appearance on The Daily Show With Jon Stewart, where he discussed his exercise regimen, the importance of a healthy diet, and how he still has all his own hair at 53.

Stewart, who during his career has won two Peabody Awards for public service and the Orwell Award for “distinguished contribution to honesty and clarity in public language,” represented the most challenging interviewer Cruise has faced on the tour, during a challenging year for the actor. In April, HBO broadcast Alex Gibney’s documentary Going Clear, a film based on the book of the same title by Lawrence Wright exploring the Church of Scientology, of which Cruise is a high-profile member. The movie alleges, among other things, that the actor personally profited from slave labor (church members who were paid 40 cents an hour to outfit the star’s airplane hangar and motorcycle), and that his former girlfriend, the actress Nazanin Boniadi, was punished by the Church by being forced to do menial work after telling a friend about her relationship troubles with Cruise. For Cruise “not to address the allegations of abuse,” Gibney said in January, “seems to me palpably irresponsible.” But in The Daily Show interview, as with all of Cruise’s other appearances, Scientology wasn’t mentioned.

An attack on an American-funded military group epitomizes the Obama Administration’s logistical and strategic failures in the war-torn country.

Last week, the U.S. finally received some good news in Syria:.After months of prevarication, Turkey announced that the American military could launch airstrikes against Islamic State positions in Syria from its base in Incirlik. The development signaled that Turkey, a regional power, had at last agreed to join the fight against ISIS.

The announcement provided a dose of optimism in a conflict that has, in the last four years, killed over 200,000 and displaced millions more. Days later, however, the positive momentum screeched to a halt. Earlier this week, fighters from the al-Nusra Front, an Islamist group aligned with al-Qaeda, reportedly captured the commander of Division 30, a Syrian militia that receives U.S. funding and logistical support, in the countryside north of Aleppo. On Friday, the offensive escalated: Al-Nusra fighters attacked Division 30 headquarters, killing five and capturing others. According to Agence France Presse, the purpose of the attack was to obtain sophisticated weapons provided by the Americans.

The Islamic State is no mere collection of psychopaths. It is a religious group with carefully considered beliefs, among them that it is a key agent of the coming apocalypse. Here’s what that means for its strategy—and for how to stop it.

What is the Islamic State?

Where did it come from, and what are its intentions? The simplicity of these questions can be deceiving, and few Western leaders seem to know the answers. In December, The New York Times published confidential comments by Major General Michael K. Nagata, the Special Operations commander for the United States in the Middle East, admitting that he had hardly begun figuring out the Islamic State’s appeal. “We have not defeated the idea,” he said. “We do not even understand the idea.” In the past year, President Obama has referred to the Islamic State, variously, as “not Islamic” and as al-Qaeda’s “jayvee team,” statements that reflected confusion about the group, and may have contributed to significant strategic errors.

Some say the so-called sharing economy has gotten away from its central premise—sharing.

This past March, in an up-and-coming neighborhood of Portland, Maine, a group of residents rented a warehouse and opened a tool-lending library. The idea was to give locals access to everyday but expensive garage, kitchen, and landscaping tools—such as chainsaws, lawnmowers, wheelbarrows, a giant cider press, and soap molds—to save unnecessary expense as well as clutter in closets and tool sheds.

The residents had been inspired by similar tool-lending libraries across the country—in Columbus, Ohio; in Seattle, Washington; in Portland, Oregon. The ethos made sense to the Mainers. “We all have day jobs working to make a more sustainable world,” says Hazel Onsrud, one of the Maine Tool Library’s founders, who works in renewable energy. “I do not want to buy all of that stuff.”

A controversial treatment shows promise, especially for victims of trauma.

It’s straight out of a cartoon about hypnosis: A black-cloaked charlatan swings a pendulum in front of a patient, who dutifully watches and ping-pongs his eyes in turn. (This might be chased with the intonation, “You are getting sleeeeeepy...”)

Unlike most stereotypical images of mind alteration—“Psychiatric help, 5 cents” anyone?—this one is real. An obscure type of therapy known as EMDR, or Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing, is gaining ground as a potential treatment for people who have experienced severe forms of trauma.

Here’s the idea: The person is told to focus on the troubling image or negative thought while simultaneously moving his or her eyes back and forth. To prompt this, the therapist might move his fingers from side to side, or he might use a tapping or waving of a wand. The patient is told to let her mind go blank and notice whatever sensations might come to mind. These steps are repeated throughout the session.